Samwise rides again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQNKRDFanQE

Available now at ThinkGeek, Super Pii Pii Brothers !

Product Features:

* Video Game for Nintendo Wii Provides a Virtual Peeing Experience
* Amazing Realistic Pee Fluid Dynamics
* Imported from Japan
* Comes with game disc and Wiimote belt harness
* Includes cross regional boot disc to allow play on US Wii consoles
* Minimal Japanese text makes game easy to understand if you can’t read Japanese
* Over 100 different peeing environments with multiple toilet and urinal styles
* Up to two players can compete with dueling pee streams

Dueling pee streams, eh ? how can you resist ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDdErzFwrRY&hl

This twenty two month old child demonstrates why the Wii kicks the arse of every other console out there, accessibility.

Opposable thumbs ? Pah !

I have just pre-ordered Mario Kart Wii !!! aka マリオカートWii !!!

It comes with a Wii wheel^k^k^k^k^k^k^k^k^k I mean a Wii-l !!!

No more Mario Kart 64 !!!

No more lusting after a copy of Mario Kart Double Dash and being put off by having to use the Wii in Gamecube mode and having to use the wired controller !!!

Well maybe a bit of lusting !!!

No playing Mario Kart DS that I completed two years ago !!!

Well maybe when I’m flying !!!

Only ten days way !!!

Apparently !!!

!!!

!!!

UPDATE : Just received an email confirming my copy has shipped !!!

ETA 30th March !!!

!!!

UPDATE : Arrived today, a day early, and I showed great restraint not rushing out and buying a copy yesterday ( which I did when DoubleDash came out, and then sold my spare copy to Pete. )

However B ( who I have not mentioned previously ) leaves Friday, I have taken time off so wii, I mean, we can hang out, maybe we can play it together ( I bought a second Wii-l, ) otherwise I can wait until the wii-kend.

On a side note, it may be the last of the post received on the Big Island as Aloha have gone out of business and they were responsible for flying the post over.

From the Honolulu advertiser …

The news of Aloha Cargo’s shutdown sent shippers scrambling to make alternative arrangements after being caught off guard.

“They just left us high and dry,” said Mike Walters, president of Love’s Bakery, the biggest customer of the Aloha Cargo operation.

“This came as a complete surprise to us because we were assured for the last month that they had a contingency plan.”

Walters, who said Love’s filled six cargo flights each night to the Neighbor Islands, said the bakery had begun to move some of its shipments away from Aloha, such as using the Hawaii Superferry to Maui.

The U.S. Postal Service also relied on Aloha to convey the bulk of its mail sent between O’ahu, Maui and the Big Island. Spokesman Duke Gonzales said the post office was attempting to put its contingency plans into effect.

Others like Art Angel, president of Angel Freight Hawaii, said he had moved his air shipments to Hawaiian Airlines after hearing of Aloha’s bankruptcy weeks ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crfrKqFp0Zg

Back in the 1970’s, Douglas Adams penned a couple of episodes for the BBC TV series Doctor Who.

One of the episodes “Shada” was incomplete and never aired, however the Beeb have put together a “webcast”, which is an audio-only Real file, or as an embedded Flash animation.

With some messing around I managed to watch some of it on my Wii using the Opera based Internet channel, and it was actually quite watchable. To save myself time, and in case any of you are interested in watching on your Wii, or Flash-enabled device ( or on your desktop computer I guess, ) I’ve posted direct links for the full-size animations. These are the high-quality versions as they streamed perfectly to my Wii.

You will have to click the link on the bottom left whenever it goes black as the episodes are divided into parts, and you will need, at the end of each episode, to click back to take you to this page ( or the button, bottom center, to be taken to the episode guide. )

For fans of the classic Doctor Who, this story was supposed to be a part of the same season as Douglas Adam’s other episodes, starring Tom Baker, and centered around “The Key of Time”, Series 17. The webcast features the 8th Doctor, Paul McGann.

Clusty have added a Wii-friendly portal.

Clusty is uniquely suited for searching on the Wii because the text entry with the soft keyboard on the Wii is very slow. With our topical clusters, you’re able to use shorter queries and just navigate with the clusters to get the results you’re searching for.

If you have a Wii and have downloaded the Internet Channel check it out …

http://wii.clusty.com/

I saw this article today, claiming that the WiiConnect24 update breaks Wii systems and suggesting you ship your system back to Nintendo.

I checked the error codes quoted ( 110213 and 32002, ) the problems appear to be with the settings on the wireless router. Make sure that the WiFi channels used by the router are either 1 or 11, I had mine on 6 initially and had problems.

Next make sure you check your firewall settings, it might seem a little extreme, but allow TCP & UDP ports 28910, 29900, 29901, 29920, 80 and 443.

These changes made my Wii update go from sucking a grape through a straw slow ( approx. 2 hours, ) to downloaded within minutes fast.

I decided to buy Super Monkey Ball for the Wii yesterday, I felt I needed a game that I could pick up and play in short bursts, which Zelda is not. Wii Sports is good, but not amazing, it feels like it was thrown together to show the possibilities of the Wii-mote.

I’m not sure about the whole monkey-in-a-ball thing, I am assuming that somewhere placing monkeys in balls was the next logical step. The Wii version appears to differ from previous incarnations as it has something resembling a plot. The plot is kinda lost on me, something about pirates in flying ships stealing bananas or some such, seems to me to be a bit superfluous, and there are end-of-level-guardians, if you are into that-sort-of-thing and feel that Monkey Ball was lacking.

Monkey Ball comes into it’s own on the Wii, the Wii-mote is almost the perfect way to control the characters movements round the various courses. Monkey Ball has always been about pure motor skills, which is now emphasised by the gyroscopic control. I’m not saying for a second that the game is any easier, but it certainly is more engaging than previous releases, once again I must stress how intuitive the Wii-mote is.

I also bought Pikmin, which I’ve played countless times before, but I love it and it was only $10. With it being a GameCube game the disc is just over half the size of a DVD, and I wasn’t sure how the Wii was going to handle it being pushed into the slot-loader, but the Wii did what it was supposed to and just accepted the disc. In the Wii menu it displays the name as GameCube, and when selected the Wii flips into some GameCube mode, which unfortunatly ignores the Wii controls. The bottom line is, unless you have a GameCube controller, which I should add, can be bought cheaply, then you will have little success playing GameCube games on your Wii.

The new Zelda game will not disappoint, the game is amazing, unfortunatly I got a migraine last night after 10 minutes of playing Zelda, so I haven’t much more to add, except to say, if I gave the impression that I had doubts about it, then for the record, I don’t.

To wrap up, here are two articles via /., both involving Wii disassembly, the first is mainly pictures off the Wii in various states of deconstruction, the second disassembles all parts and includes discussion.

Picked up my Wii and my copy of Zelda, the controllers seems really intuitive, and the gameplay is way more physical than a regular console.

I’m gonna stop typing now as it’s kickin’ off round here ….

UPDATE : It is slowly becoming obvious that between the total of 12 buttons shared between the wii-mote and nunchuk, and the different actions the wii-mote’s gyroscope and accelerometer and the nunchuk’s gyroscope can make sense of, that there are a lot of potential combinations available. Zelda is breaking me in slowly, very slowly, baby-steps, which is kind of appreciated. The sports game also gives a helping hand, so it’s much easier to enjoy the natural feel, without having to take the physical limitations of the console into consideration as much. The contrrollers seem really comfortable in the hands, and because they are seperated, the hands fall into a very natural position, very ergonomic. I think a big screen is really needed, it would certainly help prevent over-shooting, though I’ve only had it a short time, so maybe I just need to develop the required sensitivity in my movements.

The controller appears to go to sleep if unused, and a slight touch wakes it up. I’m not sure if it switches off completely if left unused, I think it must do as you wouldn’t want it to wake up anytime it was moved when not in use, but if it had been in use recently you would want a fast restart, however you would want the battery life to be preserved as much as possible, so a sleep-mode is desirable. During it’s waking faze there will be a lot of communication in both directions between the wii-mote and the console, as there is feedback from the wii-mote in the form of sound and vibration.

Every single part of the Wii seems well thought out, it is a classic piece of Nintendo ergonomic design, set up and use can be performed trivially by pretty much anyone. There are more parts than usual, which also means more points of failure, but as it’s all brand-spanking-new I’ll worry about that another day, though if you have small children who have inquisitive minds and the ability to act upon it, I’d tape down the receiver on top of the tv, and tack the cables down, but I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how to suck-eggs.

With Twilight Princess, all the classic Zelda features are there, slightly tweaked in places. It feels very polished and certainly looks it, though personally moving away from the cell-shaded rendering of WindWaker feels like a step back, but I’ve only just started playing it and it looks fantas-tic.

UPDATE : Firewall settings